Sirona Says

Recruitment and Retention has now just got harder!!

While I appreciate that the whole world is having recruitment challenges, I wanted to highlight two problems that I feel are going to impact massively on recruitment and retention. I have actually already experienced both of them with candidates in the last few weeks, and I am sure it will just get worse.

So what am I talking about? Petrol and Houses. The price of petrol is rising higher and higher every week, so obviously your staff (and you of course) will be paying more for their commute into work. With this price estimated to get to £1.50 per litre by the end of the summer, then their commuting costs (by car) have just risen by 50%. How many will be looking to get a job closer to home to cut down traveling? What are you doing about it? Are you encouraging more home working? Are you being flexible with allowing them to come into the office less? Are you actually sharing your concerns with your staff? If you don't they will look for an employer that is doing something about it.

House prices - more importantly the mortgage rate - are stopping people moving. Higher interest rates mean that mortgages have lept up substantially this year, costing people more money. There are two implications from this, 1) they may now not be earning enough money where they currently work, and may have to look at another job and leaving your company or 2) the option of relocating for a new job has suddenly been diminished for the moment, not because they don't want to move, but because they may not sell their house! So recruiting for specific skills in a market where they are absent now becomes a real problem. Whereas, before you could relocate someone with the right skills, now it will become more of a challenge to convince candidates to move. So if this is going to cause you problems, what are you doing about it? Have you even thought of the long term implications? Should you be reconsidering recruiting lower skilled and training them? Should you look at retraining of existing staff? What about ad hoc pay rises?

The one thing that both petrol prices and house prices will definitely test, and that will be how creative a company can be with their creative retention policies!!!!

Have you experienced The Frustration Cycle

This is one of the most frustrating parts of being a recruiter - when a company tells you they want to recruit, but then tell you they haven't the time to do it. Here is my interpretation of this annoyance - I have called it The Frustration Cycle!!

 

Anyone suffer the same?

Job for Life - not for us say the Generation Y'ers!

Believe it or not, ten years have passed since the phrase that went into HR and Recruitment immortality - The War for Talent - was born. It was actually Mckinsey that created it in their report of the same name. But many years after this initial offering, it could be that 'war' might be the right word!!

European demographics are changing and according to CIPD statistics, by 2010 47% of the European working population will be aged 55years and older!!

Cities beginning with letter 'B' are not good places to work

If you are looking for a new job, don't go to Brighton, Bristol or Belfast to find one. Thats the message from Badenoch & Clark’s latest quarterly Happiness at Work survey. Apparently, office workers in these cities are the least happy at work - I find that strange having worked in two of them, they are not that bad, honestly!!

The survey goes on to say that the unhappiest profession is HR (again!) with nearly a third of them unhappy in their jobs. Maybe that is why so many HR people give recruiters a hard time then - if they are not happy in their jobs, they could be taking it out on recruiters! (Maybe it's just me who has experienced this??)

The staggering figure the survey does highlight is that 48% (yes, nearly half!) of workers want to change jobs in 2008!! There is certainly a few retention AND recruitment issues  to be addressed there then!

2008 - The Perfect Storm is Brewing

No I don't mean that weather thing, or the "alleged" impending financial meltdown. I am referring to waves that will be caused by the combination of fast advancing internet technology, the rise of a generation of (very) net-savvy collaborative people and global economic interdependence.
To survive these resulting waves in 2008, companies will just have to work out how to ride them, taking notice of the growing number of organisations who are already doing this, such as Microsoft, Amazon and Wikipedia. They will have to look to self generated content such as blogs, online community sites based on the already successful concept of MySpace and Facebook and social networks such LinkedIn and Ning - all within the corporate environment.All these forms of direct inputs, will be essential to companies as they seek to improve their products, processes and their services. This impending perfect storm is changing both the rules of business and the way that companies manage their people - communication and the share of knowledge and insight via "open-source" collaboration is a direction that companies of the 21st century must adopt. If they choose to try and ride the storm without looking to the future and making changes, then they will find the going very rough indeed.